


this won't be forever

by KelseyO



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, but in that it completely ignored my intentions and did whatever the hell it wanted to, contains fandom headcanons, not in that this fic didn't want to be written, post-2x22, these two have never been so uncooperative, y'all have been WARNED
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 02:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4590135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KelseyO/pseuds/KelseyO
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I said goodnight, Carmilla,” she manages as her ears strain to sense where Carmilla is in the room, because she’s not going to turn and face her, no siree.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” Carmilla replies, not sounding sorry at all, “I didn’t realize that was a binding contract. Should I come back at sunrise?”</p>
<p>(A post-2x22 fic that was supposed to just be Angsty Hollstein Cuddles but turned into a hell of a lot more than that. Title from "Beautiful Now" by Zedd. Beta'd by uselessravenclaw.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	this won't be forever

**Author's Note:**

> I had little to no control over this piece of writing, but I worked REALLY hard to keep every moment honest and relevant, and I can't begin to tell you how much feedback/feelings would mean to me.
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

She collapses right onto the four-poster bed, because pajamas are for people with normal sleep schedules who don’t have to anticipate being woken at (multiple) ungodly hours, and therefore can afford to wear the proper comfy, cotton-y, slumber-friendly attire.

She’s lying on top of the blankets, thanking the powers that be for each and every breath she takes without something terrible happening, counting one, two, three, four, five. Her throat actually hurts a little from her outburst earlier; she almost wishes she were back in her dorm room nursing a hot cup of cocoa, but then she’s thinking about a certain pale, vampiric hand that used to bring her refills, and she pulls a pillow over her face to black out the image.

_“Do you miss me?”_

Carmilla hadn’t even been poking fun at her, or assuming Laura would say yes. It had been an honest-to-god question with a surprisingly easy answer, and Carmilla just nodded, and that was that.

She shoves the pillow to the side as the sky unleashes a comically dramatic rumble of thunder, and she glances out the window just in time to see a spider-web of lightning flash across the glass.

Great. She was totally kidding when she said she wanted some shut-eye.

Another bright flash and she flinches--she _always_ flinches--and wonders how she ended up with this stupid curtainless room as her sleeping quarters. Like, do undead college deans not value their privacy or whatever?

Maybe not, she supposes, given that the dean produced Carmilla “Now why would I change in the bathroom when I could just strip right in front of you” Karnstein.

Or maybe that was only for Laura, or maybe she should stop thinking about Carmilla altogether so she can focus on breathing and sleep and not being bothered one single bit by this storm.

“Come _on_ ,” she mumbles to herself, curling up on her side and nuzzling deeper into her pillow and squeezing her eyes shut, but another round of lightning seeps through her eyelids and she can feel the seat belt jerking against her collarbone, hear the glass breaking and the metal contorting, see her mother silhouetted in the other car’s high-beams.

_Smash_.

“Laura.”

“I said _goodnight_ , Carmilla,” she manages as her ears strain to sense where Carmilla is in the room, because she’s not going to turn and face her, no siree.

“I’m sorry,” Carmilla replies, not sounding sorry at all, “I didn’t realize that was a binding contract. Should I come back at sunrise?”

Laura mutters an “Or not” before she can stop herself, but then she feels the mattress dip behind her, so apparently Carmilla is unaffected by vaguely passive-aggressive comebacks. She shifts away automatically, and then even further when Carmilla lies down beside her, and she _really_ kind of wants to roll over and yell at Carmilla’s face, but that would require putting the window back in her peripheral vision, so she’ll just go ahead and ignore the both of them the best she can.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Carmilla muses quietly. “How something created by nature can mimic something created by man.”

She’s not going to look at her, not going to look at her, not going to look at her.

“How jarring it is to be reminded of a horror you’ve survived.”

“Carmilla,” she pleads as flatly as she can, “I’m trying to sleep.”

“I know, cupcake.” Carmilla’s closer now, but Laura doesn’t move away. “I know.”

Laura’s crying again; when did she go back to crying? “We can’t do this,” she chokes out. “ _I_ can’t do this. I can’t do any of it.”

“Oh come on, give yourself _some_ credit. You’ve _already_ done it--won over the cynics, rallied the troops, defeated the big bad.”

“I didn’t defeat anything,” Laura argues. “We tossed a campus administrator into a bottomless pit and annoyed a massive fish god. That’s hardly an impressive resume.” She sniffs then flinches at another burst of lightning. “And even if I sort of made things slightly less terrible once, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to do it again.”

Carmilla is silent for such a long moment that Laura starts to wonder if she’s used her vampire stealth to slip out of the room unnoticed, but then she hears an uncharacteristically quiet sigh.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” Carmilla begins, her voice almost a whisper, “that maybe I feel the same way?”

Laura’s chest nearly bursts under the weight of Carmilla’s question, but she forces a deep breath in and out and waits until she thinks her voice won’t shake. “You told me how to kill Mattie.”

The air between them is completely still, even as the sky above them shakes and rumbles.

“I did,” Carmilla says without emotion.

“That’s not nothing, Carm. That might make things _very_ slightly less terrible.”

When Carmilla responds after a particularly loud series of thunderclaps, the words are gravelly; tired, even. “For you, maybe. But I stand to lose my sister.”

Laura’s trying really hard to sort out these pangs in her heart, which ones are from the storm and which ones are from this conversation. “So… why tell me, then?”

“Because I can’t stand to lose you.”

She almost forgets to flinch at the next burst of lightning. “Carm,” she begins quietly as a tear rolls over the bridge of her nose, but the rest of the sentence never actually happens and they’re both swallowed up by the thunder again.

The sky quiets down and she waits for a snarky _Cat got your tongue?_ comment, or hell, even another unexpected and excruciating truth bomb; but neither comes, and now her pulse practically skips a beat.

“Carm?” she repeats, this time as a sort-of-question, and oops, she’s rolling over, and _oops_ , Carmilla’s still right there, and also a lot closer than Laura thought she was. Closer than they’ve been in weeks, in fact--save when Carmilla was bleeding from her arrow wound--and the air rushes out of her lungs.

“Creampuff,” Carmilla replies like she knows exactly the effect this proximity is having on Laura, but she doesn’t close the space or attempt to make it any smaller.

Laura can’t decide if that’s more or less annoying than the alternative.

She opens and closes her mouth a few times as she pleads with her eyes to look literally anywhere but Carmilla’s mouth--oh, and also her eyes, that’s a bad idea--and eventually they settle on the corner of the bandage that’s poking out from under her shirt. “H-how’s your chest… area… feeling?” she manages to ask.

“Similar to yours, I’d imagine.”

Laura actually looks down at her own chest before she remembers her _Like someone cut a hole in me_ line, and she rolls her eyes even as they begin to sting with more tears. “You know what I mean.”

The corner of Carmilla’s mouth twitches and she shrugs her shoulder. “It’s fine. Almost healed.”

“Good.” She swallows thickly and nods a bunch as she searches for a new place to look. “That’s good.”

“And yours?”

She can’t stop flinching at the lightning, and now she can’t stop crying these stupid silent tears. There are a few sarcastic comebacks on the tip of her tongue but none of them make it out, and instead she’s shaking her head and wishing with everything she has that it weren’t completely, absolutely against the rules to bury herself in Carmilla’s embrace.

But then Carmilla reaches out and uses the pad of her thumb to gently wipe away the moisture spreading across her cheeks, and her skin burns with each touch but her eyelids droop closed as if Carmilla’s fingerprints were a lullaby.

When she opens them again, Carmilla’s hand is resting against the mattress--close enough that she can probably feel Laura’s breath against her knuckles, but still not quite touching. She stares at it for a while, thinks about Carmilla’s fingers ghosting along her cheek and about Mattie’s fingers digging into her throat and about pieces of hearts in lockets.

“You should try to sleep,” Carmilla murmurs.

Laura’s eyes flicker to hers. “I _am_ trying.”

A soft chuckle drifts from Carmilla’s throat. “It might help if you closed your eyes.”

“Shut up,” Laura grumbles, forcing her eyes closed this time and letting out a small huff.

The room gets quiet again, so quiet that Laura swears she can hear her own heart beating, and after a long moment she cracks an eyelid to make sure--no, just to _see if_ \--Carmilla is still beside her. Not that she cares.

_Not that you care_.

_Not that I care_.

.

Her fingers are clamped tightly around Mattie’s throat and she easily rips the locket away with her free hand. It unlocks by itself and opens right in the middle of Laura’s palm, but now she’s holding an entire beating heart.

There’s a tight gasp and she turns around to find Carmilla standing behind her, staring in horror at the gaping hole in the left side of her chest.

Laura shakes her head quickly and tries to hand the heart back to Carmilla, but as she takes a step closer the muscle begins to disintegrate, and by the time she reaches her, all that’s left is one tiny lump of dark crimson.

“Carmilla, I’m so sorry,” she whispers as tears pour down her cheeks.

“It’s not enough.”

An arrow shoots through the hole in Carmilla’s chest from somewhere behind her, straight at Laura, and she wakes up to her lungs heaving for air and a cold sweat covering her forehead.

Her eyes blink open and try to focus in the dim light of room; Carmilla has managed to fall asleep without moving a muscle, and Laura glances between her and the window as she catches her breath, trying to gauge whether the storm is still going.

She counts to thirty, decides to trust the lack of lightning, slips out of bed as gracefully as possible, and _runs_. Through the house, out the door, and down the street, around a few corners, not even sure where on earth she’s going but not really caring as long as it’s _far_ and _away_.

The sky is still murky and dark but she can see the beginnings of sunrise making their way up from the horizon, and when she abruptly finds herself nearing the bench where her father gave her the tightest goodbye hug ever received on a freshman drop-off day, she plops herself square in the middle of the stone slab, holds her head in her hands, and _sobs_.

She cries for the sacrifices everyone has made for her, for the danger that Danny and LaF and Perry put themselves in on a daily basis, for all the times she’s unknowingly forced Carmilla to make horrible, painful decisions, for every increasingly extravagant lie she’s had to tell her dad in the past six months.

Her lungs shudder and hyperventilate and she cries so hard she feels like she might throw up, but then a soft, cool breeze caresses her hair just like Carmilla’s done so many times, and the sounds in her throat become incredulous laughter.

“You just can’t leave me the hell alone, can you?” she mutters, then glances up to make sure Carmilla isn’t actually standing in front of her.

There’s no brooding supernatural being, but there is a bright, fiery sliver of sun visible just above the trees, and her sobs come to a shaky halt. She stares at it until dark patches are dancing in front of her eyes, then tilts her head back and studies the clouds above her: fifty shades of gray wisps, all quiet and calm and still.

Harmless.

She sniffs and wipes her nose with her sleeve, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly; thinks about storms and bad dreams and relationships and how they all end eventually, no matter how fierce their strength or how forcefully they shake the earth.

The breeze swirls around her again and she nods once, then keeps nodding, and then she’s on her feet and making her way back to the apartment; slowly this time, one foot in front of the other, stepping to the beat of her perfectly steady human heart.

A part of her wonders if Carmilla has woken to find her missing, if she’s been worried, if there will be some emotional, apologetic reunion waiting for her when she gets back, but as she steps across the threshold, the house is just as quiet as when she left. It’s not unpleasant, though, and she’s less scared than she thought she’d be to open the bedroom door.

Carmilla doesn’t stir and Laura suddenly wonders why neither of them has made a sleeps-like-the-dead joke before. She rounds the bed and climbs onto the mattress, and only now do Carmilla’s eyes blink open, and she arches a groggy brow at Laura.

“Where’ve _you_ been?” It’s not angry or worried or annoyed; it’s just a question.

Laura doesn’t respond, just curls herself right into Carmilla’s chest and closes her eyes. Carmilla’s fingers are in her hair before she can take another breath, gentle touches against her scalp as her hair is tucked behind her ear, the same motion again and again, coaxing her into the deepest level of calm she’s felt in weeks. “Forty-five minutes,” she mumbles.

“Or not.”

She’s asleep before she can tell Carmilla to shut up. 

* * *

_Wherever it’s going, I’m gonna chase it_  
_What’s left of this moment, I’m not gonna waste it_  
_Stranded together, our worlds have collided  
This won’t be forever, so why try to fight it?_


End file.
